Department of Justice voting rights section attorney Christopher Coates has told U.S. Commission on Civil Rights officials that he will appear before them tomorrow to tell what he knows about the Obama Justice Department’s dropping the prosecution of the New Black Panther case.
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According to Hans A von Spakovsky, a former colleague at DOJ of Coates and now a columnist for Pajamas Media, Coates’ testimony is critical to getting to the bottom of the key issues in the controversy over the New Black Panther case:
“The testimony by Coates, a career government lawyer, is expected to shed light on whether DOJ:
• Discriminated against white voters in dismissing the voter-intimidation case against two members of the New Black Panther Party and the party itself that arose from incidents at a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day 2008.
• Had a general policy or practice in its Civil Rights Division of not enforcing voting laws when the subjects of complaints were racial minorities.
• Had a racially motivated policy of not enforcing Section 8 of the National Voting Rights Act, which requires states to remove ineligible voters from the voter rolls.”
Coates, a career civil service attorney and before that a member of ACLU’s litigation team, is among the most respected voting rights attorneys in the country. He headed the voting rights section until December 2009.
For more on the significance of this development, see this lengthy interview with von Spakovsky here. See also his discussion of the case here on Pajamas Media.
